Organization: Following Beijing is a little like having Springsteen as your warm-up band. London had no chance, but it also wasn’t booed off stage. There were a few glitches, a South Korean flag posted alongside the North Korean women’s soccer team, blocks of empty seats in supposedly sold out arenas. In the end, though, enough went right to keep the organizing committee off the front page of the tabloids. In England, that’s a good thing.

B

Venues: Archery at Lord’s Cricket Ground was a trip, and beach volleyball at Horse Guards Parade was the strangest thing I’ve seen in 13 Winter or Summer Olympics. But there were far too many tents and temporary bleachers, thrown up as quickly as they’re going to come down. Watching the hallowed Olympic track meet in a stadium with a temporary upper deck somehow cheapened the whole affair. The Bird’s Nest, it wasn’t.

B+

Transportation: Organizers got a huge assist from locals, who were so afraid of stepping on a subway or driving in central London that they didn’t for 17 days. Occasionally a tube line would slow to a crawl or they’d be so packed you would experience what a colleague called FPAG (face pressed against glass), but the combination of tires and rails generally got people where they needed to go. A bigger issue was when they got there. I can’t remember a Games that required more walking. You’d spend 20 minutes walking into Olympic Park, then see a sign telling you that your venue was only a 25-minute walk away.

A+

Crowds: The best part of these Games, by far. The Brits filled stadiums and then cheered robustly for their own, who responded by winning medals in record numbers. Having the track meet in a track-literate nation helped create electric atmospheres at both the morning and evening sessions of the Summer Games’ most iconic sport. The roar when Mo Farah won the 5,000 and 10,000 meters was the stuff of goose pimples.

A-

Security: I always feel sorry for organizing committees having to dump $1 billion-plus into the security budget, but we can thank Munich and Atlanta for that. The Brits had to call in the troops when the private firm responsible for hiring security came up, oh, a couple of thousand employees short. The lone irritant was volunteers constantly checking your credential every few steps, in full view of the last person who just checked it.

B-

Setting: London is one of the world’s great cities. East London is not. The idea was to revitalize a blighted section of town, but that meant the world’s greatest sporting extravaganza was held in a blighted section of town. The only thing near Olympic Park was Europe’s largest shopping mall, which overly commercialized an event that goes to great strides to avoid that.

B

Climate: Most days, temperatures were on the cool side (upper 60s) with the threat of rain. In other words, London got incredibly lucky. After nearly two straight months of rain anything was going to be an improvement. The guy who designed Olympic Stadium with a roof covering only half the seats might want to try his luck in Vegas next.

B

Competition: There were plenty of memorable moments, particularly when Brits won gold medals. There just wasn’t anything that will define these Games the way Michael Phelps’ eight gold medals or Usain Bolt’s three world records did in Beijing. In 20 years, it’s hard to say what these Olympics will be remembered for. Chris Hoy winning a bunch of track cycling medals?

B

Overall: A couple A’s, a bunch of B’s, no C’s or D’s. As a parent you’ll take that report card, but your kid’s not going to Harvard, either. Organizers didn’t want to build any white elephants but they may have erred on the opposite extreme with the reliance on so many temporary facilities. They might not have any elephants at all. In the end, these were good, even very good, but not great Games. I rank them well above Atlanta and Seoul, and slightly below Athens, Barcelona, Beijing and Sydney.